You must make a lot of mistakes in your newspaper if you need a special column for them every week," someone said to me the other day. "The T&A didn't used to need a Feedback. Things must have got worse."

Which only goes to demonstrate that when you do something with the best of intentions, you can be misunderstood. Feedback was introduced not because we're making more mistakes than we used to, but because a decision was taken to feature corrections, explanations and apologies in a special column rather than dotting them throughout the newspaper during the week. That way, readers know where to look for them.

Unfortunately, lumping them together like that and being determined to own up to our gaffes rather than sweep them under the carpet seems to have led some readers to the impression that we are getting a lot more things wrong. We're not. In fact we probably make no more mistakes than any other organisation or enterprise.

The difference between us and them is that they can sort out their mistakes privately, or even pretend that they haven't happened. But when we get something wrong, tens of thousands of readers know about it by teatime. So because we make our mistakes publicly, we put them right publicly too. Hence Feedback.

Very few newspapers, national or regional, are so open about their mistakes or take the trouble to carefully explain their processes as we try to do in this column. In fact, I can't think of a single other regional newspaper which has a Feedback or its equivalent.

It helps to show readers that we have nothing to hide and that we care passionately about the quality of service we provide for all our customers - be they readers, advertisers or newsagents.

l Actually, this has been one of those weeks when we seem to have managed to get most things right. The only contribution to the Feedback postbag has come from the ever-watchful Derek Mozley, who spotted a bit of vagueness in our awareness of just when, precisely, the Dickensian era was.

Last Monday we carried a story about a small house in Oxenhope, built around 1800, and described it as an "authentic Dickensian property".

Mr Mozley writes: "Strictly, the word 'Dickensian' can only be correctly applied to the period 1837-1870, which represents Dickens's active writing career. Also the reference to 'a 150-year-old Little Dorrit store' is slightly out - it should be 142-year-old, as Little Dorrit was written in 1857." And he adds: "Sorry to be a nitpicker!" Quite.

l But it's rather less nitpicking to point out that in Street Talk on May 19 there was a picture of Bolling Hall which was captioned "Bolling House" while elsewhere Temple Newsam was spelled "Newsham". We should know better.

l STOP PRESS: Oh dear! I spoke too soon. In a report on Thursday we quoted Dr M.M. Hossain as saying that he had had 46 patients returned from the hospital after assessment. Our reporter misheard him. What he said was "four to six". Our apologies to Dr Hossain.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.